Welcome to a new series where I challenge myself to improve some of the more popular pages on the internet. Mostly focusing on user experience, I have 1 hour to try to redesign/realign some well-known web pages.
We’re not looking at a total makeover or anything, just a simple (hopefully) upgrade. Read more →
I think it’s safe to say that there’s a shift from adding unnecessary frills and shiny buttons, to a much cleaner design aesthetic.
We are more frequently seeing combinations of big impressive images and big and bold typography to catch attention, coupled with well-spaced content type. These emerging websites allow content to shine through to the forefront. Read more →
A while back, Hayley posted a great article on improving the effectiveness of your website by looking at customer journeys throughout your website and making decisions on how to remove blockages in potential customers’ journeys to make sure your website goals are completed more often.
I’m going to introduce the idea of Multivariate Testing (or A/B split testing as it can be known), how to use it and what to expect from it which should aid in making your website even more effective.
I would say that a little knowledge of updating your website (or having a web designer handy!), empathising with your visitors and common sense is all that is needed to understand and utilise multivariate testing. Read more →
For newcomers to the blog back in Part 1 I introduced the series and defined usability. In Part 2, I gave you a taster of how a usability improvement happens here at Senior and some examples of recent tweaks within our content management system, River CMS.
In this concluding post, I’ll be giving my two pence on what makes a good usability tweak and defining and measuring success within usability.
As mentioned in Part 1, issues can arise and be identified by user feedback, observation (in testing or a training environment perhaps) and also via statistics from Analytics or a similar package. Read more →
For newcomers to the blog, back in Part 1 I introduced the series and defined usability. In this post, I shall be offering some of the examples of how we improved usability within the admin panel of our content management system, River CMS.
With our usability enhancement program for River CMS, the cycle is on-going with enhancements happening regularly. There is no start or end to improving the system. But obviously the ideas for the improvements have to come from somewhere. The River CMS usability improvements come from various sources, as shown below:
How effective is your website? Moreover… What makes up an effective website? Where do you begin? These are all key questions you need to ask yourself to ensure your website is performing soundly.
Website effectiveness can be measured in a number of ways. How effective the website is once the user has arrived there is what I’ll be focussing on. So these tips obviously rely on traffic getting onto the site in the first place!
Every website must have well-defined goals. The number of times the goals are achieved constitutes the effectiveness of the site. A goal is what you want your user to ultimately do once they have arrived on your site. It will also be measurable so you can clearly see whether it has been achieved. Read more →
Over the coming months I aim to jot down my thinking on various aspects of usability in web design. While this may not be the most structured series I’ve ever written, I hope the ideas portrayed throughout the series will help others out there. Discussion, debate and questions are most welcome.
The opinions are my own and come from the 7 years of web design, SEO and accessibility experience I’ve had. Most of the subjects I’ll be bringing up come about from my recent (and ongoing) user experience work on River CMS, what I hope is now a very usable CMS. Some thoughts are core to my way of thinking when building websites. Read more →
